Benson, Robert Hugh

Benson, Robert Hugh
(1871–1914)
English Catholic convert, author of two fantasies picturing two opposite futures for the Church.
Benson came from a distinguished literary family. Ordained as an Anglican clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and spent the last years of his life in Rome. He wrote several novels.
Lord of the World (1907), set in the twenty-first century, is reminiscent of A Short Story of the Antichrist by Vladimir Solovyev. Its chief character, Julian Felsenburgh—seen only through the eyes of others—is, in fact, an Antichrist figure, though Benson never actually calls him so. An enigmatic genius, he achieves supreme power and establishes a worldwide regime of peace and welfare, or so it appears. He founds an enlightened Religion of Humanity to replace all existing ones. His success is overwhelming, but the regime’s true nature gradually becomes visible. His supporters are led step by step to rationalize and support appalling actions in the name of enlightenment. Rome, with its pope, is independent; Felsenburgh alleges a conspiracy by the dwindling Catholic body and destroys the city by aerial bombardment. He is hailed as divine, whereupon nonconformity to the Religion of Humanity is made a crime, and dissenters are liquidated. In the final episode, a small surviving Catholic center is condemned to destruction and doomed, humanly speaking—though, as it turns out, Benson gives the story a final twist.
Many of Benson’s readers found Lord of the World depressing. In 1911, he produced a companion novel, The Dawn of All, imagining an opposite process, with the Church growing greater and greater. Strictly speaking, this is a dream or reverie rather than a prognostication. A priest who has abandoned his faith falls into a coma and wakes up—or thinks he has woken up—to find that he is Monsignor Masterman in a Church that dominates society. His memory is gone, and he has to piece together what has happened in the inferred interval. The chronology is inconsistent, perhaps on purpose: in one passage, he is told that the year is 1973, elsewhere, he is in the twenty-first century.
He learns that the Church has triumphed because of ideological and political changes. Several sciences, notably psychology, have been seen to vindicate its teachings and have given it new respectability, so that the intelligentsia who used to be opposed are now mostly believers. Concurrently with this, a reaction against Socialism has opened the way for what amounts to a high-quality clerical regime in most countries and a revival of monarchy. Only Germany is holding out. Masterman is impressed by the popularity and competence of the new order but deeply shocked when someone is put to death for a very mild heresy. He admires the pope for his courage in facing German revolutionaries who have killed his envoys. In the end, however, even a sympathetic reader may have reservations, and Benson implies that he is raising issues rather than offering a forecast of possibilities.
See also
Solovyev, Vladimir